Orient Express (20 page)

The train is racing neck to neck with another train, gaining; windows, faces, eyes blur and merge into memories gulped by the hollow roaring night, fade into other trains; the Congressional gnawing into the feverish Maryland springtime, slamming the picket doors of shanty yards full of the funeral swaying of lilacs; the Black Diamond; the nameless train from nowhere into nowhere, the bobbing tassels of the blueshaded lamp, the looking out through eyes stingingly weighed down with sleep at the red yellow vanishing flowers with twisting petals, dark bottle-shaped bulks and unexplained word, blastfurnaces; the train folding itself up into the ferry to cross the bright mica of the Gut of Canso; the speeding express of the Trans-Siberian speeding to Pekin that never left its shed. Too many trains, too many wheels clattering over crossings, strange names spelled out in the night, goodbys at ticket windows, last meals gulped hastily at lunchcounters, hands clasped over suitcases; the head of the girl at the crossing you see on the body of a trackwalker down the line, hungry eyes looking through grimed panes, smiling lips shattered into void at the next station, questioning eyes of brownarmed gangs resting on their picks.

I have slipped back into my place between the highbusted lady in serge who sleeps with a handkerchief over her face and the starched Annamite who sits bolt upright. Opposite, a newly married couple strangled by their new clothes are stickily asleep; her head leans against a pillow in the corner, her mouth is open; his red winedrinker's face is burrowed into her shoulder. The windows are closed. You could dent the air with your finger.

Waking up with the sun in my eyes I sit watching the long blue shadows of black cypresses. At a spick-and-span creamcolored station the air smells of roses and garlic and dust: le Midi.

At Beni Ounif the air was sheer white fire. It was scaring to stumble off the beer-sticky diningcar into such hugeness. A black boy in a red fez carried my bag to Madame Mimosa's. On a bed in a shuttered room I stretched out. The train was leaving the station, hooted, puffed, rumbled away into the rocky desert. From very far away the lessening sound of wheels over rails, then silence. Silence becoming dense with sleep.

The sun had set. The sky had hardened into flaming zones, topaz, emerald, amethyst. Outside my door leaning against a pillar of the porch still warm from the sun, looking out into the vast desert square hemmed by low buildings with crumbling ochre-pink porches. In front of the crenelated station three toy freightcars. Nobody in sight, not even a dog. Size expands and contracts with the changing flare of the sky. Striding out of the tiny square, down the infinitesimal street, I trip over a purple mountain. I put out my hand to touch the white wall of a house; it is a mile away across the railroad tracks. The spiky cluster-headed grass is palmtrees striding in ranks through a gash in crimson rock. Beyond the houses the trodden stone falls away into an immeasurable canyon that turns out to be a sandy runnel made by irrigation water. Wondering whether I was still asleep I stumbled down a rocky path admiring the great river valley; I stepped in it. It was a little stream broad as my foot seeping through a crack in the mudwall of a dategarden. Meanwhile night was fast screwing down a glistening lid on a dimensionless chaos. A cool wind blew. Towards the town a few campfires were twinkling. A row of twitching mounds were camels asleep; there were muffled figures round the campfires. In doorways there were lamps, shadows about them. In a bare white room at a corner three Algerian soldiers were drinking against a green bar. They told me Madame Mimosa's was on the next corner. There walking through a small conglomerate store you came into an empty diningroom lit by a hanging lamp tightly shuttered to keep the light from trickling out into the night.

After a supper of turkey and desert truffles and white wine from Philippeville to stride out of doors again into the street without footsteps. The low flatroofed houses are obliterated under the stars. Silence is stretched taut across the night. I walk gigantic above the flattened houses, suddenly shrink with a drop like an express elevator from under the soaring stars, tiny manikin tottering on infinitesimal pins, to the tiny throbbing of a heart, frail squirts of blood through a tangle of infinitesimally tiny pipes. On the taut night comes a dribbling of watery notes from a reed, the softest drumming of two tired hands. The man who ate alphabet soup against his will is forgotten. The Irishman with false teeth is forgotten. The cool bright notes of the reed ripple out of everywhere; the drumbeat rising, deepening, is modelling breathless stately landscapes out of darkness. The eastbound southbound American who ate alphabet soup against his will takes refuge in his room, beside the wide creaky bed, in the protection of the smoky lamp, out of the path of these moving dunes of sound. This is the solitude and the voices crying in the wilderness. He gets undressed, cleans his teeth, sorts his clothes, works out a few lines of Lucretius, pretends he's in Buffalo, Savannah, Noisy le Sec, Canarsie. The trickle of the flute has parched away into the hurrying driven dunes of the drumbeat. St. Anthony alone in the wilderness of dark flesh, the intricately throbbing wilderness.

But the Irishman with the false teeth wasn't killed in Stamboul. He didn't dare go to a hospital, so the Russian woman and her husband took care of him in a shed in an old sheep corral in the outskirts of Top Hanep. They all three made jumpingjacks and the girl whose name was Olga sold them in the evening in front of the Tokatlian. She sold more than jumpingjacks, and all night the husband who had been an officer in the Russian navy without ever going to sea sat polishing his high boots and groaning. The Irishman groaned on account of the pain in his shoulder and for the loss of his false teeth. They talked in French the rest of the time, lying in abandoned army stretchers they used for beds. The Irishman, whose name was Jefferson Higgins, was a Gaelic pantheist. In a broken-down creamery in County Cork, he had had long talks with the Little People in his youth. The Russian officer believed in chastity, in macerating the flesh with alcohol to burn the devil out of it. In spite of that he never drank. Olga believed in hunger, fear, and the Virgin Mary. She hated men except those she loved. Through the long August days they lay in their stretchers talking of these things while the cicadas shrilled and kites wheeled in the cloudless sky. She loved them both and bought them food and washed their clothes and hung them to dry on the roof of the shed. She loved them both and petted them and called them her little grandchildren.

The naval officer blamed the misery of their days on what he called the helpless Russian soul; the Irishman blamed it on the British government; Olga blamed it on mankind. The two men, if it hadn't been for their lice and for the difficulty of shaving, would have been completely happy.

One morning Olga came home with a copy of the Communist Manifesto. It was in three languages, Russian, Armenian and Georgian. It had been given her by a taxi-driver from Odessa who had been an ornithologist. He had taken her to his room and set her up to a meal, but in the morning he had had no money to give her, so he had given her a copy of the Communist Manifesto.

They translated it for Higgins the next day. The husband and wife cried and kissed each other. They must have a faith, they told each other. From now on they would work for Russia, for the communist Christ, savior of mankind. They must work to go home. Olga would have to give up the Virgin Mary, she was too much like the czarina. They would work as carpenters and make furniture for the new Russia. He would stop making jumpingjacks; she would never prostitute her body again. If necessary they would starve. Immediately he started building a kind of settee out of a few old boards, to get his hand in; she watched him with bright eyes.

Meanwhile Jefferson Higgins walked up and down gnawing his ragged sandy moustache with toothless gums. The wound wasn't healing properly; he suspected he had syphilis. He wanted a new set of false teeth, cleanliness and fresh linen and Piccadilly and the military club. He was sick of the unceasing chatter of the two Russians; if he'd had a gun he would have shot them both dead.

When he had Olga alone he asked her with tears in his blue eyes to take him to a communist meeting. There must be communist agitators among all the Russians in Constant'. His life had entirely changed since that night when she had shot him in the shoulder. Thank God she hadn't killed him, she broke in, kissing him on the forehead. He would never work for the British again. He would go home and fight for Irish freedom. He would hand over all the secret codes of the Intelligence Department to the Bolos. The naval officer came home and found them in each other's arms. He wants to join the communist party, she explained. The Russian grabbed the Irishman and kissed him several times on the head.

Next day Jefferson Higgins with a cigar in his mouth and a panama hat on the back of his head sat in a small room in the Pera Palace typing a report with one hand. He was clean shaven, his moustache was neatly trimmed. He wore a neat grey flannel suit. His arm was strapped to his chest with clean bandages. He had a mouthful of teeth; they didn't fit very well but they were teeth. He was typing out the description of a Bolo plot to assassinate the High Commissioners, spread mutiny in the Allied armies and with the help of the discontented Turks seize Constantinople for the Soviet government. Occasionally he stopped typing and blew smoke rings. There was a soft triple knock on the door—Kitchener, said Jefferson Higgins in a low voice. A stout grizzled man in the uniform of a British colonel came in—It's not Kitchener today, it's Baden-Powell, growled the colonel—But I knew your voice. He picked up some typewritten sheets off the table and let the breath go out in a whistle between his teeth—It'll be a jolly fine bag I'll tell you.… We'll clean the blighters up. The High Commissioner'll feel pretty cheap when he sees this. You know where to leave it?—Yes, sir. Without another word the colonel laid on the table an American passport, handsomely outfitted with visas and made out for Fernald O'Rielly, travelling for a Chicago manufacturer of agricultural machinery, and a letter of credit on Lloyd's Bank—Report December 15th in Shanghai according to orders 26b, was the last thing the colonel said as he left the room.

Jefferson Higgins typed and typed. When he had finished the cigar he rang the bell for a whisky and soda. The waiter was a Bulgarian and read English perfectly. While he was making change he glanced at the typewritten sheets. Certain names on it were familiar to him. When he got down to the bar again he sent out a compatriot of his who was washing glasses in back to deliver a message to a bearded man sitting beside the mechanical piano in a small bar in a side street in Galata playing backgammon with a onearmed Greek sailor. As a result when the British military police went round at midnight to make the arrests certain of the more weighty birds had flown.

But Jefferson Higgins was already far down on the Sea of Marmora on the steamboat of the Lloyd Triestino. It was a moonlight night. He felt molten and tender as he used to feel as a boy when he thought of the Little People and the high kings of Ireland. His Gaelic was a ladle skimming rich thoughts off the milkwhite sky. The girl with the white arms working the butterchurn. The way a white shoulder sometimes peeped out from her dress. He began humming “Kathleen Mavourneen,” shouted to the barman to bring him a gin fizz, went back to humming “Kathleen Mavourneen.” Marseilles 'ld be the first place he could get a decent meal. The Bristol. He must find a nice sympathetic girl. Getting too old to care for the wild ones. For a week he'd live like a sultan. Then he'd settle down, look up Makropoulos and make some investments. About time he started thinking of the future, of his old age. He sat watching the great dry curves of the hills shining in the moonlight. The boat was going through the Dardanelles.

Meanwhile the British were combing Pera for Russians. Several men shot themselves. Olga's husband knocked out a sergeant with a blow in the stomach and was promptly shot through the head by a nervous recruit. The Russian refugees suspected of bolshevizing were herded into a basement. Most of them didn't care what happened to them; many were glad of the opportunity of getting a square meal. Then those considered most dangerous were weeded out and taken to detention camps. The rest were loaded on a scow and towed up into the Black Sea in the direction of Odessa. But Olga didn't go with them. In the company of a French interpreter she got out of Constantinople and eventually turned up in Algiers in the establishment of a certain Madame Renée, fifty francs to the girl and fifty to the house. Wherever she went she carried her zinc-white firmly modelled body carelessly as one might carry a chair across a room.

No one ever knew how Olga managed to get to New York—perhaps as somebody's wife. Anyway the dense clattering life all about her in the East Side tenement where she lived made her feel happy although she was tired all the time. Best of all she liked the Five and Ten Cent Stores and the blue trolley cars on Second Avenue. She sang nights in a little joint far east on Seventh Street. But she looked too much like a schoolgirl when she sang. The other girl, a dark Jewess who had been to Panama, got all the applause with

A thousand miles of hugs and kisses

O … poppa
…
here we are

O so far … from Omaha
.

When we arrived in the open space among the crumbled houses of Findi the Caïd and his brother who had been a tirailleur came out to meet us. I presented my letter and black Mahomet made a little speech. We sat in the guest-chamber, a tiny whitewashed room with a running blue border of grapeleaves interspersed with the imprint of a hand at regular intervals. They brought out dates and sour milk. They were people of the Beni Amour, pure-blooded Arabs whom the French had planted in the oasis left desolate by the flight of the native Haratine and Berber people who had originally built the ksar and tended the dategardens. The wells were filling up and the sand was encroaching on the palms. When the guest dish had been eaten up we walked slowly and with dignity around to see the notable things of the oasis, the place where the battle had been between the Joyeux and the ksourians, the old wells, the dam built by people in the olden time, the vegetable gardens, the place where a foreign lady had pitched her tent and remained for five days, the tumbledown monument to the French soldiers killed in the battle, the wheel-tracks of the great autocar with six double wheels that had passed carrying officers in gold-braided hats to Timimoum. In the mountain that hemmed in the oasis to the south lived a demon named Dariuss, guarding a great treasure of gold. He rolled down rocks on people who tried to climb up there.